“Canon” for Macron

At the end of the French presidential debate between frontrunners Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate (Le Pen) attacked her rival by saying that she hoped that his offshore Bahamian account would not be revealed. On the next day, she repeated this during a morning political talk show but protected herself by adding that there was no evidence. Macron immediately filed a complaint with the prosecution for the dissemination of fake news to influence the outcome of the presidential election, and the Paris Prosecutor’s Office launched proceedings.

The French media quickly tracked the fake news trail, published at 7 p.m. in the American 4chan right-wing forum, and immediately propagated by dozens of pro-Kremlin twitter accounts with the #MacronCacheCash and #MacronGate tags. The rumor spread and was used only two hours later by Le Pen at the end of the debate.

Two documents were published in the forum, which, according to the anonymous user, expose Emmanuel Macron of having an offshore account. The first is an Operating Agreement for a company registered in the jurisdiction of Nevis Island, with Macron’s signature as the beneficiary and the second is a bank letter from a bank in the Cayman Islands, issued to a company with a similar name. Both documents were refuted by Macron’s campaign headquarters, which published his signatures and a graphology expert report backing the forgery claim.

Bivol studied the metadata of the two documents, which show some interesting details, undetected by the French media so far as they have focused on spreading fake news. Both PDFs appear to have been created with professional high-end equipment manufactured by Canon. Here is what the metadata of the company La Providence LLC’s 14-page Operating Agreement contains:

The specified time of the file’s creation 4:22 a.m. Eastern Standard Time; the file was last modified five minutes later at 4:27 a.m. on May 3, the day of the debate. The scanning machine is a Canon iR-ADV 6255, professional-grade black and white printer. The price of this gadget (new) is USD 29,999 and it looks like this:

The second file is in color and contains a single page. In its metadata we read the following:

This file was created just a minute after the previous one, at 4:23 a.m., and was last changed four minutes later. The Canon iPR C700 color printing machine that has scanned the document costs over USD 100,000 and looks like this:

What conclusions can be drawn from these scarce data? If the metadata in these two documents are original and not manipulated, it is obvious that the masterminds of the discrediting claim have access to high-end equipment that is used by large companies or institutions. The time of creation of the two documents, which is only a minute apart, indicates that the two machines were in the same room and they were, most likely, operated by two people. Moreover, the date of the files’ creation that coincides with the day of the debate, contradicts the anonymous source’s assertion that the documents had been sent to many French journalists, but no one paid attention to them.

However, it is important to note that time parameters are not a reliable indicator since such devices are difficult to set up and/or may not be set correctly for local time and the factory default data might have been kept.

More interesting is the unique identifier UUID. In Document ID, it is in version 2 and contains information on the time and the MAC address of the device that is unique to its network card.

The UUID of both devices contains the 2c-9e-fc characters. These are Canon’s MAC addresses, which confirm the printers’ descriptive data. Moreover, it is not a problem to get to the printers themselves, as their addresses are globally unique. The black-and-white printer has a MAC address 2C-9E-FC-1C-EF-D8 and the color one – 2C-9E-FC-ff-0D-6E.

In addition, metadata may be manipulated, which is impossible to prove, but such manipulation would also be a sign of high professionalism, not an amateur forgery concocted by Macron’s opponents and Le Pen’s fans.